I don’t know what people are talking about. I’m playing Mass Effect and I love it.

Actually, that’s too small a word. I adore it. Without reservation. Warts and all. It’s splendid.

It’s a game equally sprawling and bold and beautiful. Rich and atmospheric, spilling over with captivating characters, and dense with philosophically complex social and political mores to traverse. It takes its mythology seriously, but is frequently still playful and wry. And yeah, sure, there’s a bit of janky design and clunky animation, but it remains a visual and auditory marvel, with absorbing, sprawling game play and a sense of endless potential. It’s everything I’ve ever wanted in an interactive narrative experience, and has easily become one of my favourite video games ever.

No wonder they made a sequel.

Oh –

Sorry. You probably thought I meant Mass Effect: Andromeda, right? Simply because I knowingly engineered the beginning of this column to actively imply that I was? Simply because I used an Andromeda picture in the header – and another one right here?

IMAGE: Intentionally misleading

Simply because I am a jerk?

Yeah, but no. No, I meant the original Mass Effect. Classic, not New flavour. The decade old first entry into what I’m happily rediscovering might now well be considered a largely superfluous franchise.

It’s fair to say that the release of the new Mass Effect: Andromeda – the first game in the series since the ignominious conclusion of Mass Effect 3 five years ago – has been met with a tempered enthusiasm at best, and mocking scorn at worst. Over the past several weeks the game has been knocked for its bizarre facial animations, game-stalling bugs, and stilted dialogue – videos of which seemed to have mutated on contact with the internet into a virulent strain of snarky (if admittedly hilarious) memes.

There are suspicions that the game was rushed out before it had finished development (given the state of Mass Effect 3 when it was released, this would not surprise me), that its pacing is slowed to tedium by rote fetch-quest padding, and that it is littered with multiple unresolved plot threads that serve more as cheap bait for future DLC packs and sequels than offering a satisfying narrative experience in its own right.

(Please note: I’ve not played the game, myself; this is simply what I am gleaning from the general scuttlebutt on the interwebs. And do not take this as an attempt to denigrate anyone else’s interest in the game. If you’ve enjoyed playing it, I’m very happy for you. Similarly, this is in no way an attempt to insult the hard work of its many talented designers and creators who have worked on it. I cannot speak to the game’s actual quality – though I do think some of its alien vistas look quite striking. These comments, and what is to follow, are all based on speculation, and should be treated as such.)

For my part, however, none of the primary criticisms being levelled at Mass Effect: Andromeda have contributed to my complete disinterest in playing it.

Yes, the rubbery faces look silly, and yes, the quality of the dialogue – with lines like ‘My face is tired’ and Ryder’s father’s ham-fisted blather about ‘dreams and ‘dreaming for achievement’ – looks to have taken a dive, but usually I would still be keen. Throw all the bugs and glitches at me that you want. I’m deranged enough to have played Dragon Age: Inquisition on an XBox 360; I can deal with some jank in my tank. In the past I’ve found even an unfinished Bioware game to be more absorbing than most other major releases; I played Dragon Age 2; I can handle a rushed production that makes ninety percent of its locations shoddy re-skins of the same warehouse and stretch of cave. And I’m certainly not going to be scared off by whatever hateful, rabid conspiracy theory is being cooked up by gamergate trolls to slander Bioware on any given week. (Gods, I cannot believe how depressing it is to still have to deal with the toxic bilge of gamergate in 2017.)

IMAGE: ‘Sorry, my dialogue is contrived’

But in this case my apathy for the game is tied more to narrative and thematic concerns for both it and the trajectory of the series as a whole – all of which I only seem to be seeing confirmed in the aftermath of the game’s release.

To explain my issues properly I would have to go off on yet another tedious, pedantic rant about Mass Effect 3 – specifically the way that it was already heading in a disheartening direction even before its reprehensible end – and no one (including me) wants that. Besides, I’ve banged that particular drum plenty of times in the past. Seriously.

But to offer a quick summary: to me, Andromeda appears to have problems with the basic logic of its plot, and looks to be tackling a problematic theme that I doubt its creators have fully thought through.

Firstly: the plot.

From the information circulated in the marketing, I get the sense that the premise of the new game actively works against it. While I can sympathise that its creators want to get away from the controversial baggage of Mass Effect 3’s poorly-received conclusion, by choosing to set the story between Mass Effect 1 and 2 (before swiftly blasting the player several hundred years into the future into a different galaxy), the result is that Andromeda’s audience is being asked to suspend not only its disbelief, but the logic of all the preceding games.

Because nothing about this game’s central premise is possible in the universe of Mass Effect between the first and second games. Here, several arks, stuffed with hundreds of thousands of cryogenically frozen souls are sent on a journey to an as-yet unexplored galaxy in order to populate new worlds; but there seems to be neither any reason to do this, nor any explanation for how this heretofore inconceivable scheme is now occurring.

There is no population crisis driving them to action (nothing is ever mentioned in the original games, where humanity still has room to expand all over the place), nor does it appear to be a failsafe in case the apocalyptic threat of the original games’ antagonists, the Reapers, prove to be real. (Admittedly, this could be an eventual plot twist in the new game, but again, no one in Mass Effect 2 or 3 ever mentions such a mission).

Moreover, given that the state of the universe at the end of Mass Effect 1 had neither the science, political co-operation, nor resources, to put together an enterprise of such magnitude – and, again, the fact that no such astonishingly expensive, complex, time consuming program was ever mentioned in all of Shepard’s subsequent interactions with the several governments involved – it seems to be a narrative device chosen more out of fear than purposeful storytelling.

Perhaps if the story had been set many hundreds of years after the original trilogy it could have made sense – science might have advanced enough to make what was proposed less preposterous; a new predicament could have been established to justify why such a gargantuan undertaking needed to be; but in an effort to avoid the consequences of Mass Effect 3, the writers appear to have simply jettisoned the logic of their own universe entirely. And it is hard to invest in a story that has already disrespected your willingness to believe in it before it begins.

But what is most worrisome for me is that theme of colonialisation at the heart of the new game.

Because Andromeda clearly has a precarious narrative tightrope to walk. These humans are not the upstart, inquisitive underdogs looking for a seat at the grownups table of galactic politics that they were in the original trilogy; here they are invading colonisers. Humanity is intruding into a new world, looking for lands to populate, and they are involved, almost immediately, in violent exchanges with the present occupants of these lands. There is a disquieting aroma of imperialism in that set up, one that appears to only intensify when your player character’s father dies and you inherit the role of King.

…I mean, ‘Pathfinder’.

IMAGE: ‘Hello chaps! I wonder if we might discuss a time-share arrangement?’

Ethically, that is an uncomfortably loaded position to place the player. In the days of Mass Effect 1 Bioware I would have trusted that an awareness and sensitivity would permeate the writing, exploring the complexities of this premise to tantalising effect.

Unfortunately this project has been led by Mac Walters, one of the two principle writers responsible for Mass Effect 3’s grotesque finale and asinine central plot. In that game, whether consciously or not, Walters took the myriad possibilities of the original two game’s branching narratives and reduced them into a quest to build a giant spacemagic doohickie that could end war with a pick-a-box of hate crimes. He took complex philosophical contemplations of cultural diversity, questions of artificial life, free will, and justice, and boiled them all down to a clumsy grey nihilism, producing a text that by its end actively championed mass-murder, mind-control, and forcibly rewriting people’s DNA against their will, all in a thumping, Michael Bay tone of vulgarity and vapidity.

And given that Andromeda already appears to be following its predecessor’s mistakes – the writers are lazily rehashing the ‘ancient unknown aliens have left mysterious plot-helpful devices scattered around for mysterious reasons’ story; as mentioned, they leave the majority of the larger plotlines inconclusively hanging – it’s hard to give them the benefit of the doubt. After all, none of those gimmicks worked out so well last time.

And finally, while I’m throwing unjustified shade at the game, I may as well admit that to me it simply doesn’t look that fun to explore. No doubt I’m wrong – and again, I welcome players to correct this misconception – but from everything I’ve seen so far, I can’t help it.

Andromeda is clearly big – the advertising and pre-release previews incessantly promised environments several times larger than all previous Bioware games – but to me Mass Effect has always been about more than traversing a landscape. It’s about exploring different cultures, different personalities. So while this new universe might be physically expansive, it sure looks a lot emptier.

By all accounts the game has jettisoned the entirety of its most idiosyncratic alien species. There are no appearances from the drell, the hanar, the elcor, the quarians, geth, volus or batarians. Meanwhile, in their place, only two new additional races are expected to fill the void – one that looks to be cannon fodder; the other like a fairly generic clone of Avatar’s the Na’vi.

So, long, long, long story short: I’m not exactly racing out to buy a copy of Andromeda.

IMAGE: Secret third race of new aliens in game: the NoBetaTests

But what all of this recent buzz in the press (both positive and negative) did achieve was to make me nostalgic for the original games: Mass Effect and Mass Effect 2. These works were – and still remain – two of my most beloved gaming experiences, so in light of all my newfound apathy I started to wonder:

How well do they still hold up?

It was a question that was particularly pressing given that I now find it impossible to think back on those experiences without recalling the way in which they ultimately conclude – all that hope and wonder and grace reduced to a spiteful, nihilistic wet thud that its writers presumably thought was profound.

So I decided to revisit the first two games in sequence. To re-explore them, both with the (relative) fresh eyes of several years distance, and examining – really for the first time – the way in which foreknowledge of the trilogy’s vile ending impacts the experience.

That is what I will therefore be doing over the next few posts: cataloguing my tedious, erratic, distractible, rambling (and yes, long) thoughts on each game. Pondering what, at least for me, remains of this revolutionary series. What has dated it, what has tarnished it, but overall, what once made – and still makes – this series so magnificent.

And spoiler alert for the first game: It’s fantastic.

Because it’s all there in that first game. All of it. Everything that made the Mass Effect universe great. Everything that captivates and excites the imagination. Yes, the sequel’s promise of decisions that carry over from game to game was ripe with possibility; yes, the chance that you could watch entire civilisations change over multiple years, or grow alongside characters that you had fallen in love with was enticing; yes, the hope that game play mechanics would get polished and refined with new instalments tantalised; but returning to that first game, as I have over the past few weeks, provokes a startling revelation: much of what follows Mass Effect 1 is unnecessary. Or at least, not impactful enough to dull the charms of the original.

To be clear: I’m not suggesting that the sequels should not exist. Speaking as someone who adores the second game in the series (niggling narrative issues and all), and who even found momentary flashes of greatness in the trilogy’s dumpster fire of a conclusion, the subsequent games clearly have a reason to be. All I am saying is that in revisiting the first game I have been delighted to discover that although Mass Effect is often spoken of as a trilogy (and now as a trilogy with a weird prequel/sequel/soft-reboot thing poking out of the side of it), in truth everything that made this series so wondrous appears, already fully formed, in the first game. Some concepts may get fleshed out further in later instalments, the combat might be tightened, and there is a general uptick in the visuals (aside from your own character’s face in game 3), but often, not only does the first Mass Effect perfectly achieve the overarching narrative’s thematic goals, in many ways it articulates its mission statement more eloquently than the series would ever manage again.

But I’ll get to that next time. For now I’ll just leave my argument unfinished, but overflowing with promises of what’s to come. Let that tantalise and excite the imagination. Let it build up impossible expectations that can never realistically be met.

Because, as this wondrous series has proved, that always works out great.

…Right?

p.s. – I am serious about welcoming people to tell me I’m utterly mistaken about Andromeda. I highly doubt I will ever play it, but I would be delighted to hear of people’s experiences enjoying the game.

See, these past few weeks I was writing an article about Anchorman 2 – a film that, despite arguably not being as funny as the first (which would be near impossible), I think is in many ways far more impressive, particularly for the way in which it exploits its own comedic legacy to a thematic end. Sure the first film might have that element of surprise that can never really be replicated, but the second – almost unlike any other sequel I can think of – builds upon that history to elicit both grand nonsense and pointed social commentary.

If you’re at all interested in seeing how quickly I can swing from playfully recollecting ‘I love lamp’ to scrambling up on a soapbox to shout at the sky about the infantilised redundancy of the real world 24 hour news media, then you can read the article here.

But that’s for another time, because right now I want to talk about pain. And horror. And the gnashing of teeth. Because hopefully amongst my fog of blatant self-promotion you caught that admission that is the cause of all my recent agony – the sentence that has caused me so much distress:

‘Almost unlike any other sequel I can think of…’

That’s right. Because in order to talk about Anchorman 2 and the way it deals with the fact that it is a sequel, I actually had to let myself think of a couple of examples of other comedy sequels to give the discussion some context.

You know:

Here I am, typing, typing, arguing that comedy sequels are usually hard to do… Gee. I guess I’d better cite a film just to establish that there is some truth to that claim. What could I use? Ah, yes. Of course. The Hangover.

Done.

…But I guess I need another one, just so it doesn’t seem like I’m picking on a specific franchise. Okay, how about Legally Blonde 2: Red, White and Blue? Waste of a film; suitably stupid name. Perfect.

Done and done.

And then the screaming started.

Because suddenly a trapdoor in my mind kicked open, and I was inundated with memories. Tragic, harrowing, flooding memories. I was astronaut David Bowman staring into the cryptic abyss, maddened by the chaotic, unfathomable sprawl.

Yes. That’s how traumatised I was; I couldn’t even think up a better analogy to use than 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Suddenly there was Mannequin: On The Move, the Big Momma’s sequels, Deuce Bigalow: European Gigolo, Weekend at Bernies 2 (although to be fair, the originals of each of these films were abominable already). There was Be Cool and Shrek The Third and Look Who’s Talking Now and Men in Black 2 and Ghostbusters 2 and Evan Almighty and Teen Wolf Too (poor Jason Bateman) and Father of the Bride 2 (poor Steve Martin) and Blues Brothers 2000 (poor John Goodman) and Son of Mask (you think about what you’ve done, Jamie Kennedy!) and Caddyshack 2 and Dumb and Dumberer.

And in case those don’t quite fit your definition of emotionally traumatic assaults on good taste: did you know that there was even a sequel to The Jerk? A sequel without Steve Martin.

No – I’ll say that again. I want that to sink in.

Without. Steve. Martin.

The Jerk.

Sure, it was a TV movie, and history has largely forgotten about it; but a crime is still a crime. And if I have to know that, then you do too.

So I apologise if it feels, at this point, like I’ve just been punching you in the heart with each of these film titles. If it helps, just think how hard this was for me to recollect them all. To see them come flooding in to my psyche all at once. I was starting into the abyss. Into a hellscape of franchise fatigue and overstayed welcomes. A bunch of half-animated corpses, shuffling through the motions, each dragging its wasted potential and rote redundancy along in its wake.

In the case of sorry re-treads like Blues Brothers 2000 or Dumb and Dumberer I just keep thinking of that Simpsons joke where Homer, dressed as Krusty the Clown, misunderstands a bit of playful pantomime and tackles a man dressed as a burger-thief to the ground. As you hear the wet thud of Homer pounding the burglar’s face repeatedly, the camera pans across the faces of a gaggle of horrified onlooking children to find one boy sobbing:

‘Stop… Sto-o-o-o-op… He’s already dead.’

…And yes, I’m aware of the sad irony of using The Simpsons to criticise the beating of a franchise into a sorry, unrecognisable pulp. Dear gods – has it really been 25 years? Over half of its lifespan it’s been unwatchable?

I mean, I understand the impulse. I get the motivation. Audiences loved the first film, and they instinctively want to revisit that world – even if the joke they loved has already been told. I can even see why the creators of the original work, either wanting a victory lap or with some leftover ideas that they still want to try out, might want to risk taking a second plunge. And there are – as I say in the Anchorman article – the occasional exceptions. The ones that work. Anchorman 2 is definitely one of them. The second Austin Powers also manages to stick the landing (although the third is rather more shaky and indulgent). From everything that I am hearing (and I want to make clear, I am not speaking with any authority, as I have not yet seen it myself) 22 Jump Street is apparently a delightful surprise – which seems fitting, since that first film was far, far funnier than it had any right to be.

But too often you get Grown Ups 2 (sigh …or for that matter, Grown Ups 1) which at this point in Adam Sandler’s career may has well have been advertised with a poster of a stick, a dead horse, and a whole lot of tacky product placement splattered with gore.

I just think it’s a shame that we don’t see more examples like Hot Shots Part Deux or the Muppet films, which have a central premise, a cast of returning characters, and the same creative team, but that are willing to spin out in wild new directions – to try whole new genres and styles.

After all, one of the most interesting examples of a film sequel that I can recall is actually only a pseudo-sequel: the follow up to A Fish Called Wanda called Fierce Creatures.

IMAGE: Fierce Creatures (Universal Pictures)

Now, I’m by no means holding up Fierce Creatures as a great sequel. In fact, it defies that definition both as a technical ‘sequel’ and by virtue of not being universally considered ‘great’. But it’s good. It’s funny. It’s made by talented people, and most importantly in a cinema landscape lousy with derivative regressions: it feels fresh.

Perhaps the happy product of John Cleese and Michael Palin’s sketch mentality days in Monty Python, although staring the principle cast of A Fish Called Wanda, and with largely the same creative team working on the production, Fierce Creatures is a film set in an entirely new time, location, and narrative. The script and conceit is different; the actors play different roles. Whereas the first film was a heist caper with a lot of social satire about English class consciousness and American cultural stereotypes – a collision of stuffy Brits and uncouth but passionate Americans (with some accidental Terrier assassinations thrown in) – the second is a wild farce about a zoo becoming despairingly over-commercialised and compromised – the crush of amoral corporatisation upon a gaggle of fervent, but disorganised caretakers.

And yet, despite their superficial dissimilarities there are some notable thematic ties between the two. The Cleese and Jamie Lee Curtis disproportionate romance returns. Kevin Kline gets to play a another (albeit less charismatic) swaggering dullard. Palin returns with an alternate take on a socially dysfunctional figure with accidentally murderous powers. It is still fundamentally concerned with non-conformity and constraint; with greed and deception. It plays out a continuation of the familiar tropes and tones of the first film, just delivered in a new, and by virtue of their revitalised format, unique way.

It also contains a scene where Kevin Kline assaults a panda.

So there’s that too.

Again, Fierce Creatures will never be heralded as one of the all time comedy classics (nor does it strive to be). In comparison to its forbearer Wanda it’s more a broad, playful jaunt. But it finds something novel to say while still retaining the idea of a sequel, not stripping the original of its lustre by shoving its way back into a world that had already reached its natural comedic resolve.

It does what comedy is meant to do. It takes risks. It’s willing to look at things from a new, unexpected angle. To surprise.

Because it’s a whole lot harder to surprise your audience if there’s a numerical symbol beside your film’s title already telling them exactly what to expect.

As gaming publications around the world finish declaring their Game of Year awards and looking back over the previous twelve months of releases, it is hard not to pick up on the sentiment that overall many do not consider 2012 the most stellar year for gaming. Sure, there were some standout surprises that defined much of the critical discourse – X-Com: Enemy Unknown, The Walking Dead, Journey, and Dishonoured for example (all games I am ashamed to say I have not yet had the opportunity to sink into) – but overall the picture being presented by even some of the most glowing commentary is tinged with a vague sense of gloom.

New consoles were seen to be flagging: Sony’s Vita, thanks to an anaemic launch line-up, was released into the world to be greeted by the sound of tumbleweeds; Nintendo’s Wii U has likewise underperformed, and despite having the most unique (or needlessly convoluted) control scheme ever devised it was criticised for taking so long to catch up with the HD graphics of 2006 and botching its online capabilities. The purported ‘future’ of gaming through motion control titles (to put it politely) failed to impress: the horror of Kinect Star Wars’ dancing Han Solo cannot be unseen, and what in the name of Batman’s shiny grapple was Steel Battalion: Heavy Armour?! Publishers too came under fire as many of the most highly anticipated games (read: giant, sequel blockbusters) were said to have disappointed on some level or another, offering experiences that, despite being highly polished, were either derivative, anti-climactic, or technically and narratively lacklustre (see Resident Evil 6, Max Payne 3, Diablo 3, Far Cry 3 …and personally, I’ve not yet shut up about the half-baked grotesquery of Mass Effect 3’s morally deplorable conclusion).*

Of course, thankfully these kinds of sweeping generalisations are not the whole picture of this past twelve months, and wholly fail to capture the more interesting minutia that has defined this exciting period of the videogame medium’s growth. Because, yes, while a catch phrase like ‘2012 was a bad year for gaming‘ is unfair to some of the works being shovelled into the ‘fail’ pile, what is far more unfortunate is that such a blanket summary completely dismisses the innovation evidenced in the smaller, noteworthy trends that were able to flourish this past year now that (perhaps for the first time ever) the usual saturating buzz that surrounds every Triple-A title could finally be penetrated.

‘2012 was a disappointment‘ fails to capture any of the nostalgic innovation we saw this past year in games like Mark of the Ninja and Fez; it totally dismisses the industry-wide revolution of downloadable titles and independent publishers that have exploded to the forefront of the audience’s consciousness with games like FTL and Hotline Miami; it barely even touches upon the works that tried (even if not always successfully) to explore the nature of gaming itself, to test the boundaries of its capacity to convey complex, emotionally resonant material, such as in Spec Ops: The Line’s autopsy of the shooter genre, the utterly charming Thomas Was Alone’s playful evocation of rich interpersonal relationships between two dimensional shapes, or Papo and Yo’s poignant metaphorical depiction of domestic abuse.

Yes, this past year may have been a little sparse if judged by the traditional blockbuster headliners (Halo 4 was celebrated, but not really considered revolutionary, and Assassin’s Creed 3 seems to have alienated as many as it enraptured); it may have suffered some from the displacement of a few of the most hotly anticipated games of the year being pushed into early 2013 (Bioshock Infinite and Tomb Raider are still being polished, and the long, long awaited GTA5 will arrive whenever Rockstar deigns); and it may be judged a little saggy and tired by those, both in the industry and audience, who are becoming increasingly disenchanted with the limitations of the current hardware and who simply want the next console cycle to be announced; but the year was by no means a resounding downer.

Certainly it was not a failure in light of the revolutions in mechanics, artistic expression, and distribution that flourished in its span. FTL was birthed into the world through the then-untried method of crowd-sourcing investment (and Double Fine’s adventure game is still forthcoming through the same route); Journey revealed untapped potential in emotive co-operative online multiplayer experience that extended beyond being verbally assaulted through a headset because you tanked a death match; and The Walking Dead proved episodic narrative to not only be viable, but potentially the most absorbing, exhilarating means of investing an audience in a harrowing, adaptive tale. And Fez? Come on! He’s wearing a Fez, people!

And so, with all of this righteous surety ringing in my head, scoffing at anyone who would dare dismiss this past year as a shadow of greater times, confident that despite the fact that we are crowding around the light of this console cycle’s dying embers we are still being lit with its warmest glows, I decided to arrogantly give it a shot myself, to think back on my own most transformative gaming experience of 2012 and decide which game most entranced, most moved, and most surprised me this year…

And to my utter astonishment (and rather to the complete contradiction of everything that I’ve just been blathering about in the preceding paragraphs), it’s actually not a game from 2012 at all. It’s a game from 2010 that I only just got around to playing…

Damn.

That’s embarrassing.

So for me, in my utterly subjective, walled-off-from-the-rest-of-civilisation, so-anachronistic-as-to-be-completely-meaningless, opinion, 2012’s game of the year is…